LUPICA: Republicans are asking the middle class to play dead while tax reform walks all over them

Republicans and President Trump seem to be giving the middle-class the middle finger. (ERIK DE CASTRO/AFP/Getty Images)

His name was Bill Brink, and he was a giant of this newspaper, still the managing editor of the Daily News when I first came to work here. And there came the day, with the city in great economic peril, that the overmatched President of that time, Gerald Ford, announced that he had no intention of bailing out New York City.

Bill was at the afternoon news meeting when Ford was the big news of the day, and as the other editors discussed how to book the paper for Oct. 30, 1975, Bill Brink was drawing on a scratch pad in front of him.

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Finally, he found five words and six syllables that he thought would not just fit the story, but the front page of the Daily News:

"Ford To City: Drop Dead."

The Daily News’ famous front page from Oct. 10, 1975.

It only became the greatest front page in our history, and one of the great headlines in all of newspaper history. Gerald Ford eventually lost New York in that election by less than 300,000 votes, and lost the presidency to Jimmy Carter.

Now it is all this time later, and Republicans in Congress who make Ford, in retrospect, look like a giant of government, come forth with what they call tax reform and it is nothing more than a head fake, and more than somewhat of a cynical con.

These people and the President for whom they front might not be telling taxpayers here and across the country to drop dead. Maybe, and more appropriately, they are just doing what Paul Krugman suggested in the Times the other day, and giving the middle class the middle finger.

The Republicans swear up and down, on everything except Roy Moore's Bible, that this tax bill will grow the economy and create jobs. More than that, though, they want you to believe that they are doing everything except carry members of the middle class in this country out of a burning building. Sure they are.

This isn't about you, especially if you are from New York, where millions of residents of this state would be forced to forfeit deductions for state and local income taxes, and sales taxes, and property taxes, at a cost of more than $70 billion a year.

This is what Rep. Pete King told John Catsimatidis on the radio on Sunday:

"The new deductions will not be enough to offset the loss in the real estate and state income tax deductions…(The reform) is being done at the expense of New York and New Jersey…New York is a donor state. We give far more to Washington than we get back."

Again: This isn't about you. It is about them. But then it is always about them. These people always remind you of a wonderful old Hall of Fame baseball owner named Bill Veeck, and his definition of a hustler:

A hustler, Bill said, was someone who could beat you out of bus fare and then somehow make you feel as if he had done you the favor.

So on Thanksgiving Week 2017, they push this bill of theirs — like pushing something with a stick — in the direction of the Senate, and tell middle class Americans to give thanks. Well, yeah, but only if they don't read the fine print, about a bill that in 10 years will only be benefitting the top 1% in America.

"The most opposition to the bill in my district comes from Trump supporters who feel like they've been forgotten," Pete King said to me on Saturday night. And here is what Adam Davidson wrote in the New Yorker the other day:

"In 2019, the first full year that this bill would be law, the benefits are concentrated on the bottom of the income stream, with middle class people, on average, paying just under 10% less in taxes than they would if the law weren't passed. With each passing year the benefits shift upward, toward the rich. By 2021, those making between $20,000 and $30,000 a year are paying considerably more in taxes, those between $30,000 and $200,000 see their benefit shrinking, and those making more start to see their taxes falling."

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Not about you. About them.

Are you kidding? This is all about the Republicans need to get a legislative win, any kind of win, as a way of showing they have done something with this inside straight of theirs, a Republican in the White House, a Republican majority in the House and in the Senate. They are the hustlers here, fronting for the rich.

The biggest winners over time will be the rich, and corporations, because of a bill that somehow — if you do read the fine print — provides more cover to those who can afford private jets in America than to graduate students still drowning in student debt.

So the GOP isn't telling the middle class to drop dead, necessarily. Just telling them to play dead, while the party in charge of this country, at least for now, walks all over them. And beats them out of a lot more than bus fare.